Former Clinton staffers are pushing back on allegations in a devastating new book on the campaign

Staffers who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president are pushing back on how they were characterised in a devastating new book on the Democratic nominee’s White House bid.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” that Clinton’s campaign lacked vision and was filled with infighting staffers who were more concerned about their own careers than they were about helping the candidate win.

Many staffers have publicly voiced their issues with the book.

Christina Reynolds, a deputy communications director for the campaign, wrote in a post on the website Medium that “it’s hard to read a depiction of the campaign that paints a dedicated, cohesive team as mercenaries with questionable motives who lacked a loyalty to a candidate described as ‘imperial’ and removed from the campaign.”

“That’s just not the campaign, the staff or the candidate I was in the trenches with for 18 months,” Reynolds wrote.

While Reynolds didn’t dispute any specific allegations in the book — she said she wasn’t writing the post to “fact check” Allen and Parnes — she wrote that “contrary to the ‘mercenary’ description in the book,” the campaign staff “knew that there was only one goal, and one night, that mattered.”

Other Clinton staffers shared the post on Twitter and described their own memories of the campaign:

I don’t recognise the campaign depicted in Shattered. It was tough but we stuck together & all our proud of how hard our candidate fought. https://t.co/fJMeYtS0PK
— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) April 19, 2017

Clinton’s former travelling press secretary, Nick Merrill, tweeted a long series of photos of happy moments from the campaign trail. Longtime aide Philippe Reines and communications director Jennifer Palmieri also joined in.

“You know, they can say what they want to say, that it wasn’t the campaign they knew, but, you know, we talked to hundreds of people,” Parnes said. “This is their story from inside the campaign. This is what they told us. You know, we weren’t talking to outsiders for this book.”